AN EXPLANATION OF SOUNDSPEL NOTATION
by Ed Rondthaler

The roots of SoundSpel reach back to 1908. Today’s refinement of this notation is a studied balance between the ideal and the practical. SoundSpel is a 4% shorter than traditional spelling.  It uses the traditional 26-letters and achieves a spelling close enough to the sound of carefully spoken words to be learned by children as readily as the i/t/a.   Yet, it is close enough to current spelling to be read with reasonable fluency by present readers after a few lines of practice. 

Achieving that goal has required a compromise with Utopia, to wit: SoundSpel retains a few short, high frequency, illogically spelled words: of, the, as, to, was, do, etc. These have to be learned as logograms or sight words rather than as phonograms or a string of sound-signs.  This, for present readers, does much to preserve the normal, overall appearance of the page. In certain cases the position of a phoneme determines its spelling: how/out, saw/auto, etc. The current spellings of th for both thy and thigh and x for ks/gs are retained. Schwas have been retained as in traditional writing system where any vowel letter can be used to spell this unstressed mid lax sound.  Retaining schwa encourages distinct pronunciation and aids foreign students in determining syllable breaks correctly.  This Soundspel chart lists 14 pure vowels but one of the vowels, (ur), is obscure  ur is a pure vowel but ue is not.

Today’s SoundSpel is intended to put English spelling in the same class as languages whose spellings are learned without significant difficulty.

The fact that anything typed on keyboard by those who are now literate will be able to be transliterated into SoundSpel automatically by computer should remove some of the resistance to change. [on line converter]  [stand alone converter is more robust and available at ALC]

SoundSpel, then, is close enough to the sound of words to be learned easily by children, yet close enough to traditional spelling to be read by present readers after a few lines of practice. The term ‘SoundSpel’ is essentially correct, but should not be taken too literally. It should be understood as bringing enough order and logic to our present chaotic spelling to meet the need of those at the bottom of the literacy ladder, while inconveniencing those at the top as little as possible.

(SB) The problem may be that in order to help those at the bottom, the notation may need to be highly phonemic and systematic.  A fully phonemic notation must respell at least 60% of the words in the dictionary.  All of the phonemic proposals to date respell more than 75%.  The amount of inconvenience tolerated by those at the top may be extremely low - The maximum amount of respelling they will tolerate is probably less than 10%. 

The great hope of the SSS has always been that there can be a compromise, a half way measure that will satisfy both constituencies.  This may be a false hope. 

The linguist Douglas Hofstadter once said:   "People are more likely to change their religion than they are to change their orthography."  The amount of resistance to orthographic change cannot be underestimated.  

What seems clear from two years of discussion is that it is very difficult to get those committed to the general idea to agree on a particular half way measure.  There are hundreds of ways to make this compromise. How do you determine where to make the break?  Should it be a 50% solutions such as surplus cut spelling, a 70% solution such as RITE, or a 90% solution such as Spanglish?  Should the new spelling accept sound symbol correspondences closer to the Latin original that every other language uses or retain the idiosyncratic shifted values of the traditional writing system?  What is the threshold of inconvenience of those already literate?  My guess is that it is closer to a 10% change than to 70%. 

It is possible to spell out the    requirements of a new spelling system  ?

1. It must be readable without a key.  So far we have not come up with an objective test for readability.
GH developed an objective way to measure the deviation from dictionary spelling but this is not identical subjective estimates of oddness. 

2. There must be an ASCII based version of the new code.  While its published form may use diacritics, there must be a form of the new spelling that can be quickly typed on a standard QWERTY keyboard. 

4. The new notation must not obscure the regularities found in the traditional notation.  It should be compatible with widely accepted simplifications such as altho, thru, thoro, lite, acomadation, etc. There should be a way to get from one code to 85% of the other.  This has sometimes been called backward compatibility.  I think the new code should also illuminate Middle English and Old English. 

5.  It must be shown to make a 50% improvement in literacy rates.  Unless the new code can make a significant dent in the illiteracy problem, it is not going to be seen as worth the temproary inconvenience.  While i.t.a. enabled children to acquire a kind of literacy twice as fast as with the traditional writing system, most of those gains were often erased when the students transitioned to the conventional code. 

My thought is that people have to become literate in two codes, a pronunciation guide code and a hopefully evolving traditional code.  The only type of evolving I can imagine for the traditional code is the greater acceptance of simpler variant spellings.  although, through, thru, accommodation, etc.  The new spelling should not be at odds with these evolutionary changes. 

From an article in the Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society [JSSS27] by  Ed. Rondthaler 

There is already software on the Internet that will automatically convert any text written in the traditional writing system [TES] to ALC Fonetic. It is simply a matter of copying the text you want to convert and pasting it into the textbox on the screen.  In seconds, the converted text appers in another textbox where it can be cut and pasted into email or printed out.  The BTRSPL PERL converter simply substitutes words found in a word pair database. [many, meny  years, yeers  ago,ago ].   If you entered many years ago you would get back meny yeers ago.   [fonetic converter]

In 2000, ALC will unveil  new stand alone software package that will convert words typed in TES to fonetic.   This will enable one to type in simplified spelling before he or she has learned it.

[ER] The SoundSpel notation ALC uses is a slight modification of 1941 Ripman, with 1960 Dewey revisions plus a bit of New Spelling [ NS90] (but not the y for ie), and no change in a dozen or so short high frequency words such as of, to, do, etc. A good example of it is the Nue York Tiems page in the JSSS 27-2000/1. 

I give a lecture on spelling reform, and at the end I ask a person in the audience who has never seen it before to read aloud an entire Mark Twain page printed in SoundSpel. 

The others in the audience have copies of the page and can follow along. NEVER has anyone had the slightest difficulty reading it. It always brings cheers. It convinces the group that reading a simplified spelling would be no problem.  This has told me fifty times that SoundSpel can be read easily by present readers. 

As to writing it, they will be able to write it automatically with the new program -- until the spelling becomes familiar . So as to a notation that has been proved acceptable and workable by numerous readers I think we have it in SoundSpel (with an ample corpus of 44,000), and as to the automatic implimentation of writing we will have that with the new program. 

[SB] The same can be said about Saxon Spanglish which is closer to Middle English than ALC fonetic.
Although SS refuses to endorse the shifted sound values, it can still be read with relative ease.  The reason for this is that there was never a complete vowel shift.  Examples of the older pronunciation can still be found in English.  Restoring the Saxon alphabet quickly reveals what words have shifted values and which ones don't. 

Many words described as irregular turn out to be correct in Saxon:  [They] should not be converted to [THAY]. [ Alien  Amino Acid ] should not be respelled as  [AELEEUN and UMEENO ASID  in fonetic] it should be slightly repronounced as [ah-lee-en  ah-mee-no  ah-sid]. 

The point is not to duplicate a particular dialect but to get close enough that the word can be understood by all dialects.  Just because [alien] has a spelling pronunciation in Saxon of [a:li:'n] is not a prescription for everyone to change their speech patterns. 

Simplified American Spelling:  [version 2 of the linear symbol sound list]

sound ----------------------------------> spellings

/a/   is represented by a:at

/ae/   is represented by ae:sae,wae,sprae,maeking

/aa/   is represented by a:car, aa:faather

/au/   is represented by au:auto, aw:saw, a:allmoest (followed by ll), o:sofft (followed by ‘ff’, ‘st’ or ‘ng’)

/air/  is represented by air:fair, err:staeshunerry

/e/   is represented by e:bed

/ee/   is represented by e:feever, e-:re-enter (stressed long vowel prefix)

/er/   is represented by er:her

/i/    is represented by i:it

/ie/   is represented by i:iecon, i:  justifi (words ending in /ie/)

/o/   is represented by o: pot  [same as aa?]

/oe/   is represented by oe: soelar, o: potaeto (words ending in /oe/)

/oi/   is represented by oi:toi,boi,joi

/oo/   is represented by oo: moon, u: evenchual (unstressed /oo/ following ‘ch’, ‘j’ or ‘zh’)

/ou/   is represented by ou: out, ow: cow

/u/   is represented by u: up

/ue/   is represented by ue:  manuescript,  yoo: yooth  ues

/uu/   is represented by uu: cuuk, u: jury

shwaa is represented by a: abuv, e:ietem, i:pensil, o:iedol

shwee is represented by e: react, i:patio, y:hapy  |  riyact, patiyo, happy

shwer is represented by er:  leter, or: author, ar: colar

/b/   is represented by b:rob

/ch/   is represented by ch:such

/d/   is represented by d:sad

/f/    is represented by f:fat

/g/   is represented by g:big

/h/   is represented by h:hat

/j/    is represented by j:job

/k/   is represented by k:kit, c:cat, q:qit (followed by /w/)

/l/    is represented by l:let

/m/   is represented by m:map

/n/   is represented by n:sin

/ng/   is represented by ng:sing, n:junk,jinx (preceding ‘k’ or ‘x’)

/p/   is represented by p:pep

/r/    is represented by r:raly, rr:carry (following stressed short-a,e,i,o,u)

/s/    is represented by s:so, ss:wunss,sinss

/sh/   is represented by sh: she, shoe, shoo

/t/    is represented by t: tot, taut, pet

/th/   is represented by th:  the,thin

/v/   is represented by v:vote 

/w/   is represented by w: wet, wh: when (following /h/)

’x’   is represented by x: extra,  exam, cs: ecstasy

/y/   is represented by y: yung

/z/   is represented by z: zebra, s: tois

/zh/   is represented by zh:mezher

Compact tabular representation of the same information

Each cell in the table represents one of 36 phonemes and 12 compounds found in English speech.
The table on the left is Unifon II, the one on the right is ALC fonetic.
The 6 short checked vowels are listed first, then the 8 long vowels [yeloe], then 3 important diphthongs [green].  PatEO [ALC: patio]  fOlEO [ALC: foelio]  [Notice that phonetic is not as fonetic as Unifon.]
verE hIlE [ALC very hiely, SS very haily pattio foalio]

ALC Fonetic: Soundspel   [latest GP table]  48u2c

American Literacy Council Sound Spelling ALC Fonetic  /fònetik alfàbet/ aeiou aa ie b p r  er a au-aw ier d t l e ae air - err th th m  m i ee [i]-e eer-ir g k n o oe-o or v f ng uu oo-u tuur j ch h u ur - er ue z s w | wh oi-oy ou-ow our zh sh yoo ue [i] used in unstressed medial positions hee taut dhe taat hou too sing yirrz agoe. He taut the tot how to sing yeers ago.

Minor Problems with ALC Soundspel:  [uu] looks like a long vowel.  It is a short /U/.  Assigning <oo> to /u:/ means that thru and menu are spelled *throo and *menyoo.  Having oo for /u:/ instead of uu allows one to include <to> in the group of words with curtailed spellings. Terminal vowels in English are always long.  The problem is that <oe> is also shortened to o as in <show> *sho. A terminal u has no meaning.

ALC Fonetic: Soundspel   [latest GP table]  48u2c

American Literacy Council Sound Spelling ALC Fonetic  /fònetik alfàbet/ a aa ar b p r  er e ae air d t l i ee [i] eer th th m  m o au-aw or g k n uu oo-u ur v f ng u aeiou er er j ch h ie-i oe ier z s w | wh ou-ow oi our zh sh yoo ue [i] used in unstressed medial positions hee taut the taat hou too sing yeerz agoe. He taut the tot how to sing yeers ago.

Minor Problems with fonetic:  [uu] looks like a long vowel.  It is a short /U/.  Assigning <oo> to /u:/ means that thru and menu are spelled *throo and *menyoo.  Having oo for /u:/ instead of uu allows one to include <to> in the group of words with curtailed spellings. Terminal vowels in English are always long.  The problem is that <oe> is also shortened to o as in <show> *sho. A terminal u has no meaning.

*The au sound requires four exception rules to handl saw off, sofft, all, moss? or? and song.
[or] would normally have the same pronunciation as [aar] without an exception rule. 
Shwa and related unstressed mid lax sounds continue to be difficult to spell.  Low predictability. 
[oo] and [u] for /u:/evenchual, dual,  [to] is unchanged.  Exception rules need to be stated better.
justify = justifi /justifai/

[Sam] Orton Phonograms - Vowels  [listed elsewhere]
Many phonics programs introduce 70 to 80 Orton phonograms as a means of teaching the symbol-sign correspondences.  Each phonogram is said to have 1 to 8 associated sounds.  [see also Caleb Gattegno's list]  [Riggs-Orton Phonograms]
The English writing system has 230 phonograms.  On the average, each phonogram is associated with two sounds. It is important to learn 80 of them, but this is less than half.  LINK

The issue is how should the least able or most challenged students be taught.  The spelling societies recommend starting with a phonemic writing system.  The phonemic system can be taught in 3 months and everyone can master a consistent system.  Half of the words in English are spelled consistently, the other half use a variety of spelling patterns.  Once the consistent system is fully mastered, students can start working the various historical, positional, etymological, and  foreign spellings.  Most people never master irregular spellings except for the high frequency words.  i.t.a. - initial teaching alphabet
[The 2 stage reform proposal]

a (at, ate, want, talk) 4 out of 9                     ALC:  at  aet  waant  talk
Missing: spa sofa ago23% care  any                        spaa, sofa, ago, cair,  eny/enny

e (end, we) 2 out of 11 sounds [p. 99, Rel-Freq]  ALC: end, wee - we
Missing: er, resume                                                 er, rezumae

i (it68%, final, chic) 3 out of 8                          ALC its, fienal, sheek
Missing: i=/i:/ pencil i=@, y, e, E                            pencil/pensil,  yeeld, ...

o (dot, open, do, cost) 4 of 9 [Q, A, O, oU]

u (up, music, blue, put) 4 of 9 [V ju u: U]
Missing: @-schwa, w-consonant, i, e,

y (myth, my, baby) 3 of 4 vowel 85% of the time
Missing: @ schwa

Can you recognize these words?

spanglish	alc-fonetic	traditional	spanglish	alc-fonetic	traditional
disolv	disolv		friedam	freedum
conncriet	conkreet		dor  formen	door?
gaarbaj	garbaj		viddio	video
ov   oven	of oven	aev?	success	succes
juncshan	juncshan?	junction	cabinet	cabinet
prepeir	prepair		prepeir	prepair
valliubal	valueabl	valuabuul	thot  thawt	thaut
diziez	dizeez	dizEz  d&zEz	revaluushen	revoluushun
awf  ofen	of auf  aufen		cawling	c?ling	calling
spectram	spectrum	spectrum	elafant	elefent
desain	aisle, isle		inheil	inhail
wimmen	wimun?		wvman	wuu mun
skuul cuul	skul cuul		jiaagrafy	jiografy
leizy deiz deyz	laezy daez		binociuler	bienocular

Long Vowels in   a  ei  ie  aw  ow  uu
Long Vowels in Truespel  aa ae ee aw oe ue
Long Vowels in Fonetic  aa ae ee au-aw oe oo-u
Short Vowels in Saxon      a./ae e   i   o.  u./w
Short Vowels in MenuSpel  a  eh  ih   ah   uh

ee is not defined and could be an alternate for ie. In ancient Saxon, ee=ehh or ey.  There are a variety of complexities [such as z=s and s=ce [ais-aice?], tion for shen] that could be added to Saxon that would make it more like TO.  The issue is how many of the exceptions and complexities to add in the base form. Saxon already includes the irregular c.  This convention makes ci, ce = si, se.  Otherwise, c=k. o=awe and can be replaced with ao or aw in the terminal position but not au which is a slightly better approximation for ou in haus/house. y which was the  whistle lip y in Saxon [equivalent to the French tu and rue] is now the schwi or [unstressed i:] in very.  In other positions, traditional spelling uses e for schi as in relief. [rielief, rylief]  
reason /riezan/ 
This should be written in ALC fonetic, not Spanglish
The fonetic version appeared in the JSSS/27-2000/1 and can be scanned in.
JSSS 27-2000/1 included this imaginary front page news story written in ALC fonetic.  The same story is written in Saxon notation below:  [www.spellingsociety.org]

Rules for ALC SoundSpel

Problem is these are not really rules but correspondences
plus a few exception rules.  

ALC's 'Soundspel' alphabet is shown below. Children, adults, and foreign pupils who learn this one-page system will be able to write-- "as it sounds"-anything they can say in English. The inherent phonetic principle is the well-established one normally followed by languages that use an alphabet.

It is for English, an equivalent of the phonetic spelling used daily by all who write in Spanish, German, Hungarian, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Turkish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian, Swahili, Dutch, Korean, Hindu and scores of other languages. Today we have the expertise, the system, and the great social and economic need for an orthography that frees us from the ordeal of memorizing thousands of spelling irregularities.

Consonants and single sound consonant pairs

b as heard in beg, habit, rib 

c/k as in cat, cup, became, kit, back    back is an exception that needs a rule.

zh as in vision, pleasure 

Short vowels... the most frequently heard vowel sounds

a as heard in act, at, am, bag, can, tap, carry .... weak-a as in organ. 

e as in ebb, end, set, bed, mend, merry...weak-e as in novel.

i as in it, in if, tip, pin, gives, banish .. weak-i as in pencil.

o as in ox, odd, hot, sobs, boxes, sorry ... weak-o as in lemon. 

u as in up, us, but, fun, mud, gum, love.

Long vowels ... Silent-e gives a preceding vowel its long name-sound.

Ae as in A, ate, aim, same, cape, day, they ways. (Ae, aet, aem, saem...)

Ee as in E, eel, eat, feet, field, team, scene, ski, key. (eel, feet, feeld, teem...)

IE as in I, ice, tie, eye, guide, fight, ride, buy. (ies, tie, ie, gied...)

OE as in O, old, toe, only, home, boat, sew, know (oeld, toe, oenly, hoem, boet,...)

UE as in U, unit, hue, cute, used, utilize, few. (uenit, hue, cuet...)

Vowel Pairs... each pair of letters represents a unit of sound.

aa as in father, calm, ma 

air as in hair, fair, care, swear, where, their

all as in all, tall, fall

ar as in are, card, far, dollar

au/aw as in auto, fraud, cause/ saw , sawing, lawyer

er as in her, early, mercy, baker

oi as in oil, join, toy 

oo as in ooze, eventual, moon, zoo 

or as in for, original, doctor, order

ou/ow as in out, mouth, sound/ how, cows, power 

uu as in should, bush, put, foot, book, good

ur as in jury, rural, allure, tour, azure

No change, by and large, in names that begin with a Capital letter. No change in was,as,of,he,she, me, we, be, do, to, thru , off, -ful, and their compounds.

No change in plural-s (man's, his) and in the 3rd person present singular (he runs), even tho the s is pronounced z. Where confusion might arise (sees) use ss (seess).

--------------------------

r r continues, as now, to indicate that the preceding vowel is short -- carry, merry, sorry.

Unstressed "1/2-ee" sound continues to be spelled with e or i or y as heard in unstressed syllables of between, detect, reform, champion, editorial, fifty.

Short vowels (a,e,i,o) in unstressed syllables are often given a neutral pronunciation close to the sound of `uh' (about, system, easily, atom). Phoneticians and linguists call this diluted sound `schwa'. There are no changes in spelling of short (schwa) vowels in unstrest syllables - organ, novel, pensil, lemon -- unless the vowel clearly
misleads, or does not help in pronouncing the word distinctly. 

NOTE: When you hear a word with a schwa, you cannot tell what vowel is used to spell it. For example, the same sound is heard in nectar, theater (British theatre), actor,nature, whatever! Although Soundspel does not solve this problem, do not despair! Most people who like reformed spelling are not perfectionists about things
that make no difference, so if you write acter instead of actor they won't be upset. Besides, most people do not know how everything is spelled in reformed, so they won't even recognize it as wrong. So give it your best guess and go on. If in doubt use the most common form, er. 

A long-O or long-I sound at the end of a word may be written as a single letter -- banjo, go, so, alibi, hi, mi fli (but -e is retained before a suffix: banjoes, alibieing, flies etc.)

In vowel strings the syllable ends after the first fonetic vowel-pair -- flooid, freeing, hieer, power, continueing, evalueate; creativ, react, re-enter.

We accept the flattery of a capital I for 'me'. Why not extent the courtesy -- a capital U for 'you'?

Fashen iz a form uv uglínes só intolerabel dhat wí hav tú ålter it evrí siks munths.
Fashan iz a form av uglienes so intolerabl that wi hav tu olter [awlter] it evry six munnths.

"Wen in dhe Kors uv húmen events, it bekums nesesarí for wun pípel tú dizolv dhe politikel bands witsh hav konekted dhem with anudher, and tú asúm amung dhe Pauers uv dhe erth, dhe sepret and íkwel stäshen tú witsh dhe Lås uv Nätsher and uv Nätsher's God entaitel dhem, a dísent ríspekt tú dhe opinyens uv mankaind rekwairs dhat dhei shüd deklér dhe kåzes witsh impel dhem tú dhe separäshen."

Wen in the cors av hiuman events, it becummz necessary for wan piepl tu dizolv the polittical banndz wich hav coneckted them with anvther, and tu asuum amvng the paurz av the erth, the sepret and iqual steishan tu wich the los av neicher and av neicherz God entaitald them, a dissent rispect tu the opinnianz av mannkaind recwairz thaet they shudd decleir the cawzes wich impell them tu the sepperashan.

walk = woak = wåk
fault = foalt = fålt
law = loa = lå
thought = thoat = thåt
ï for ai, also ie
culkin-40characters40sounds

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